Piercing: Everyone Has A Plan

(Sorry about yet another delay - my second vaccination dose packed enough of a kick to make me sleep all weekend)

Conventional wisdom has it that serial killers work up to their first murder through extensive use of fantasy. They imagine what it’s going to be like, they plan and plan and plan, linger over the details, imagine how it’s going to feel, until the day they work up the courage to make the fantasy reality. And then as often as not, the plan falls apart. Intended victims have minds of their own, not as pliant and obedient as in fantasy, and it’s a lot harder to kill someone than you imagine it will be. Bodies are hard to get rid of too. I suspect this is especially a problem for most serial killers, because so much of serial murder seems so often to be about control and dominance, and that’s a lot easier to accomplish in your own imagination, where the props in your fantasy don’t have agency and circumstances always seem to bend exactly to your needs. Reality isn’t like that at all, so all of the planning based on fantasy crumbles. Control is lost. In the words of Mike Tyson - “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

Piercing is a stylish, unsettling film about best-laid plans and how they go awry. It largely lands well, though I’m not sure it quite sticks the ending.

The film opens with a man standing over a baby in a red-lit room, icepick in hand. So you know we’re in for some shit. The man is Reed, and the baby is his child. Reed does not stab the child, but you can tell it’s taking some restraint. His wife comes into the room and he hides the icepick behind his back. He’s a family man, but he wants to kill, very badly. He’s preparing to take a trip out of town that his wife thinks is for a business conference, but is in reality his opportunity to book a hotel room, hire a sex worker, and then murder her. He’s thought it all through very carefully. He packs for the trip - clothes, toiletries, rope, chloroform, his icepick, a journal detailing the steps he’ll take to the letter - and kisses his wife and child goodbye.

Once ensconced in his hotel room, he rehearses what’s going to happen - what he has planned to happen, what he has fantasized about happening - before calling the agency. The woman he’d asked for is unavailable, they tell him - would he prefer another woman who could be there right away? It’s already starting to go wrong. But he’s waited too long for this, so he agrees. Cut to Jackie, sleeping on satin sheets, awoken by a voice mail from a pimp with none of the unctuous civility of the person who talked to Reed. He’s got a job for her, and she’d better get there quick, and she should bring all of her toys. So Jackie pulls it together and heads to the hotel.

Jackie has her own ideas about how tonight is going to go.

The majority of this film is centered on Reed and Jackie, and what happens that night, and they are a study in contrasts. Reed is all control and precision, at least on the surface - he’s an architect, he’s meticulously groomed, and he rehearses how the murder is going to go extensively, walking through it step-by-step, what he’s going to say, where he’s going to stand, even down to timing how long it takes. He’s taken notes. He has it all worked out in his head. And what a place his head is - beneath all of the neatness and precision is a roiling mass of murderous impulse revealed in brief glimpses that lie somewhere between nightmare and flashback, painting the picture of someone who was born…wrong, and wants nothing more than to sate his homicidal impulses. But it’s not an especially great disguise - he can keep it in place for his wife, but he’s obviously very uncomfortable with human interaction (which makes sense, because other people are outside of his control), and almost the instant that Jackie - a living, breathing human being, not a passive object of fantasy - walks into the room, his carefully constructed scenario starts to fall apart. He didn’t expect any of this.

Jackie, on the other hand, wears her torment right on the surface - you don’t get the same insight into her that you do into Reed - she is as opaque as Reed is transparent - but there’s a strong self-destructive streak and a lot of pain visible in her face and voice and actions. She is careful and thoughtful in her environment, but she is no stranger to self-harm, and she flirts with oblivion. So there’s an undercurrent of will she/won’t she throughout the movie, shifting in implication as to what that means as the film goes on. It’d be too glib to say that Reed represents order while Jackie represents chaos…it’s more like Reed typifies an approximation of life, the mask of sanity, while Jackie is actual life in all of its messy, complicated, imperfect glory. The film doesn’t over-exposit, doesn’t tell us exactly why these two people are the way they are, not in any conclusive way. We get much more of a look at Reed’s inner world (as nightmarish as it is) than Jackie’s, but overall it just gives you enough to hint at the depths, at how bad this could go, and then plays with the tension between these two people over an economical run time. It’s not exactly a battle of wills, more a battle of desires - who wants what they want at any given moment, and how badly they want it.

So there’s a pretty strong narrative and thematic through-line, but what I think really gets this film over is the strength of its vision. It’s relentlessly non-contemporary - from the credits to the cinematography to the music, it looks and sounds like something from, say, the late 1970s, but not obtrusively so. It’s not self-consciously retro like so many grindhouse “homage” films end up being. From the wardrobe to the set decoration to the lighting and soundtrack, the lurid preoccupation with the intersection of sex, death, and style, it looks and plays like a really nice hi-def restoration of some forgotten giallo - indeed, some of the music is taken directly from other films in that genre, so it’s hardly coincidence. There’s a strong commitment to a specific aesthetic and a striking use of imagery that combines fetish gear with body horror in a way that sort of reminds me of a David Cronenberg take on The Cell, but it’s not overplayed - the imagery tells a story about the inside of Reed’s head and then it’s gone - alongside a tug-of-war between someone who wants to kill but has lost all control of the situation, and someone who may or may not want to die, it’s hard to tell because even in the world outside of Reed’s head there are definitely moments where what’s going on may very well be a hallucination, and there are points where it’s hard to tell whether Jackie is being sincere or following some S&M script that she thinks this is all about. The result is unnerving - Reed isn’t quite sure what’s happening, when or how he lost the plot, and we aren’t really sure what’s happening either because the relationship between reality and homicidal delusion is, throughout, pretty damn shaky, and so there’s no place for anyone to get comfortable..

When Reed and Jackie meet, Reed’s plan goes right out the window within minutes. Jackie is the one in charge here, and it couldn’t be any other way - a plan is just a plan, that’s all, and Reed’s need for control is fundamentally at odds with any unpredictable variable. And realistically speaking, any other human being is an unpredictable variable. He can imagine and fantasize all he wants, but the instant it becomes real, at least some of it will be out of his control, and he loses control quickly. He didn’t account for Jackie. That mostly makes for a pretty strong movie, but the ending feels…abrupt and anticlimactic. I think it hurts it a little, after a first act that is Reed’s building anticipation, a second act that is everything failing to go the way he imagined, and a third where the masks come off. There’s a lot of back-and-forth in this film, a lot of uncertainty, and I think I expected a punctuation mark - maybe a period, maybe an exclamation point, not an ellipsis. I expected to get punched in the face, and I think the film suffers for its absence.

IMDB entry

Available on Netflix

Available on Amazon

Spring: Hybrid Vigor

(Apologies for the missing week - work has been a bear lately, but things are easing up.)

One thing I’ve noticed about a lot of the movies I’ve really liked while writing this thing is that they are often not strictly pure-bred genre films. I mean, I think it’s true that if all you consume is the same type of art you create, you’re going to get boring art. The best musicians listen to styles of music outside their genre, some of the best filmmakers watch a wide variety of films. The best horror movies aren’t just horror movies, they’re also dramas or thrillers or science fiction or crime movies or hell, sometimes even romances. Call it hybrid vigor - making something stronger by diversifying its underlying genetics.

The flip side of that is that every now and then I’ll get a film that’s putatively a horror movie, or a movie that has horror elements, but isn’t really a horror film. Monsters comes to mind, and now, so does Spring. It’s technically a monster movie, I guess, but ultimately it’s really more of a heartfelt, sorrowful meditation on loss and love.

We open on a young man in a modest, dimly lit bedroom. He’s sitting at bedside, talking to a woman lying in bed. She’s pale, quiet, gaunt. Not long for this world. She tells him a joke, he tries to tell her how amazing she and his father were…but then she’s gone. He said his goodbyes, his I-love-yous, and now there will be no more of that.  His name is Evan. He’s the only child of only children, lost his father to a heart attack some months ago, and then his mother got cancer. Now they’re both gone, after he’d left college to come home and take care of his mom. They’re both gone, and he’s bereft.

Evan has had the roughest of all rough days, so he goes down to the bar where he works for some whiskey and consolation. But it’s a bar, and kind of a divey one at that, so there’s a young woman throwing some kind of “I do what I want” fit and her boyfriend decides that Evan’s looking at his woman and wants to do something about it. Evan has just watched his mother die, is still processing the idea that he’s got literally no family left, and now here’s some aggro motherfucker trying to start something. So Evan busts the gold-fronts right out the guy’s face. Of course the cops get involved, the dude is probably gonna press charges. “Run up, get done up” isn’t a viable defense in court, and the bar’s owner can’t have that kind of heat on the business, so he fires Evan even though he wasn’t on the clock. Now he doesn’t have a job, the cops are after him, and the asshole follows him home so now he knows where Evan lives. 

It’s been a really bad fucking day, so Evan spends his inheritance on a trip to Italy. Just fills a backpack with some stuff, buys a ticket, and goes. He has no idea what he’s going to do there, he just knows that it’s away. He falls in with a couple of dudes from the UK that he meets at the hostel where he’s staying, they suggest a trip up the coast. There’s a lot of drinking and them sort of goading Evan into approaching a woman. I mean, what’s a trip abroad without a fling or two? Needless to say, being jet-lagged and wracked with grief is rough on his game. But then there’s this mysterious woman in a red dress. She wants Evan to come home with her. He wants to, but he owes his traveling companion a round, and wants to meet her later. She says no, now or nothing. She doesn’t “date.” But Evan doesn’t forget, and after his traveling companions bail in search of new adventure, Evan sticks around in this little coastal town, finds a room and some work at a nearby olive farm. He keeps an eye out for her.

He keeps an eye out for her, and sure enough, one day he runs across her again. He’s persistent, though not obnoxious. There’s some charm there. When he says she’s the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, you get the sense it isn’t a line. Her name’s Louise. She’s a grad student in biology. She studies genetics, and has conned her way into a grant that allows her to travel all over Italy. Not a bad life at all. They spend a day or so together, visiting a museum, talking, drinking wine, talking, and talking, and then of course they fall into bed. Not a bad day at all…

…until, in the light of the next day, Louise sits up, desiccated and feral, skin smoking where the light hits it. She runs for her bathroom, fills a syringe, injects it, and becomes something living again.

Something human.

So yes, it’s a monster movie, but only in the sense that there’s a monster. Which is not to say that what Louise is isn’t central to the story - it is - but it’s not simple. She’s not a vampire or a werewolf or a zombie or what have you. She’s just…got a different biology from most people, and the film is about what that means for her, for Evan, for the idea of the two of them, for the idea of what life looks like. She’s been alive for a very, very long time, and would like for that to continue. All Evan knows is that he wants to spend the rest of his life with her, and what Louise knows is just how painfully short that span of time is, on her timeline.

As monster movies go, this one is deeply human. There’s a sense of melancholy rootlessness to Evan - he’s still in shock and grief, and being the kind of man he is, he doesn’t really have a way to articulate that. He’s not stupid, he just lacks a lot of options for dealing with these kinds of feelings, so he’s pitched himself headlong halfway across the world, no idea of what awaits him, just sort of going on momentum alone. When something feels that awful, you just…run. As fast as you can, as far as you can. This is echoed by the cinematography - the film is suffused with the sort of dreaminess you feel when you’ve been up too long on too little sleep, and everything goes sort of soft around the edges, because that’s pretty much where his head and heart are. The editing and pacing is crisp, with some inventive transitions and juxtapositions that serve to reinforce how much in shock Evan really is. Slow, prowling aerial drone shots of the Italian coast mean you never quite lose the feeling for how far away Evan is from home, though things do start to cohere as the film goes on and Evan sees how else life could be for him, and interstitial shots of nature in all of its weird, microscopically close glory reminds us of how little we really know about how life works. 

And like Louise, the film is very much its own beast. It’s definitely got its horrifying moments (the practical effects are gruesome and largely believable, helped by being employed judiciously and not being lingered on too much), but it isn’t necessarily a horror film. It’s got moments that are very funny, but it’s not a comedy. The dialogue isn’t quite naturalistic, but it’s snappy and not overly affected, and communicates who these people are well. It isn’t necessarily how people actually talk, but it feels honest. It comes from the heart. The film paints a picture of masculinity as a place where you feel things deeply, but don’t always have a way to really articulate them, so they remain repressed, or are expressed imperfectly, in dramatic gestures or bursts of violence. Evan lost everything he had, and so he ran as far away from the scene of the crime as he could, and he found someone beautiful and fascinating, and so with a glimpse of how else live could be lived, he decided to make something out of it. Never mind the medication, the transformations, the deaths, Evan saw something good. There’s a monster, but it’s not a film about triumphing over the monster. It’s a movie about just doing the best you can with the few tools you’ve been given. It’s not always smart or the right choice, but it’s all you have.

It’s a movie about a guy who meets a girl and maybe it’s all moving too fast and she lives a really complicated life, no, even more complicated than that, but the beating heart here is not one of tension or danger or imminent violence, it’s something more soulful than that. It’s the idea of making the most of the time you have, because nothing’s promised, and you never know how things are going to turn out, and wringing everything you can from here and now. There’s a lot of loss in this movie, and no happy ending is promised. These are basically decent people who make mistakes, who act selfishly, who lash out, but we all do. It’s part of being human. It’s a monster movie, but it’s not a pure-bred monster movie. It shares DNA with Before Sunrise, Altered States, and An American Werewolf In London, to name a few. It’s startling and uncomfortable and tense and funny and sad in equal measure. It has hybrid vigor.

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu

Available on Amazon

Rattlesnake: Not So Much A Slow Burn As No Burn

Different types of stories require different types of pacing. If you’re telling the story of someone who gradually finds their normal life turned upside down, you probably want to go with a slow burn, gradually escalating the tension to a late-film reveal. On the other hand, if you’re telling the story of someone put into an impossible situation, in a fight for survival or a race against time, you’re going to want to keep things tense and fast-paced, to communicate a sense of urgency.

Pacing isn’t the biggest problem with Rattlesnake, but it’s definitely right up there. It’s a dull, interminable, and formulaic exercise, almost entirely devoid of tension or surprise.

The movie opens with a woman and her daughter driving down a long, lonely stretch of Texas highway. The woman is Katrina, and apparently she and her daughter Clara are “starting over,” though exactly what that entails is never made clear. They’re playing an alphabetical version of I Spy to pass the time while they drive. Katrina’s also really big on inspirational podcasts, real power of positive thinking-type stuff.  She and Clara have a conversation about a boy at school who was bullying Clara’s friend. Clara says he deserved to get hurt. Katrina admonishes her, saying “nobody deserves to get hurt.” Even if you don’t know what’s coming, it’s a little on the nose. 

And sure enough, their car blows a tire, and when Katrina pulls over to change it, Clara wanders off and gets bitten by the titular rattlesnake. They’re in the middle of nowhere, Katrina can’t get a phone signal, and her daughter is worsening fast. Katrina spies a trailer in the distance, and although it appears deserted at first, a woman emerges from the back and says she’ll take care of Clara. We don’t see what happens, but Clara’s symptoms subside and the woman directs Katrina to the nearest town, telling her “we’ll discuss payment later.” Once they make it to the hospital in tiny little Tulia, TX, doctors determine that she doesn’t have anything worse than heat stroke, and look at Katrina strangely when she insists she was bitten by a snake. And then a well-dressed man walks into the room after the doctor has left, telling Katrina that he’s here to discuss her payment. Katrina reaches for her insurance information. 

“No,” the man says. “Your other payment.”

It’s very simple, the man says. In exchange for Clara’s life, Katrina must take the life of another person, and it must be done before sundown if she doesn’t want Clara’s healing to be undone. Clock’s ticking.

The premise is established early on, and the biggest problem with this is that little is done to develop the story beyond that. It’s pretty simple - Katrina needs to kill someone in this small town before the sun sets or her daughter will die. And there’s not much to it outside of that. So what this means is that Katrina looks for opportunities to take a life, but you know they’re doomed to fail, because at that point the movie will be over and at this point it’s only about fifteen or twenty minutes in.. For a story in which someone needs to die by sundown, there’s surprisingly little feeling of desperation or urgency. The stakes are literally life and death with a running countdown, but the pacing is sluggish, and Katrina never really registers more than what seems to be mild dismay at her situation, so there’s very little sense of momentum or tension. It all feels…leisurely, settling quickly into a rhythm of Katrina looking for an opportunity, then blowing that opportunity, then some mysterious apparition shows up and does something spooky to remind her of her obligation, rinse, repeat. I found myself saying “how much longer until this is over?” only to realize it was just the end of the first act. I’ve seen some formulaic horror films, but this one almost aggressively failed to hold my attention.

It’s not just the pacing either, there’s also an absence of real stakes as well. Katrina looks for an easy, justifiable victim, and the film front-loads her hard as someone who doesn’t believe in hurting other living things (apart from the “nobody deserves to get hurt” exchange at the beginning, there’s an animal-rights  “Friends, Not Food” bumper sticker on the back of her car, and though they don’t tattoo KILLING IS BAD on her forehead, they might as well). This means the entire premise of the film is a setup to see what it takes to get her to sacrifice her values, and it’s pretty shallow in that respect too. Another source of tension should be the act of pushing Katrina to do something contrary to her core values. We should get a sense of what this is costing her, she should look tortured, desperate, sick with the idea of what she has to do, and she never really seems more than a little worried. There’s no real journey there either - she looks for the easiest, most justifiable targets possible, the film hands her a false start or two before settling on a cartoonishly bad person who totally deserves to die, so it never feels like a challenge or a real conflict. It never rises above the level of cliché, and although it didn’t end exactly how I expected it to, it feinted toward that ending before shifting to some seriously contrived bullshit that took almost all responsibility off of her shoulders, so she barely had to compromise her principles at all and got what she wanted. 

Oh sure, the film tries to end on a spooky note, but it mostly lands flat because it’s not clear what the implications are. I’m certainly a big fan of not overexplaining, especially where the supernatural is concerned, but all of this feels a little out of nowhere. Apparently this town is plagued by mysterious random murders that are the result of people getting caught in this bargain but it’s not clear why or how, and the appearance of previous victims as messengers to Katrina would probably be a little spookier if you didn’t come to expect them like clockwork by the second act. So this might be one of those rare case where I’d like a little more than “oooh, a ghost healed her daughter and now she has to kill someone.” 

I think maybe the best way to describe this film is as deeply mechanical. It’s shot and lit like a well-budgeted TV show, and the soundtrack smothers everything in a layer of ominous ambient sounds, pounding drums, shrieking strings, there’s nothing subtle about it - everything is punctuated with musical stings just in case you don’t know it’s scary. It’s one of the films where you can see all of the moving parts, where it feels about as inorganic as possible. Sure, there are some gorgeous shots of what appears to be central Texas, and the scene where Katrina learns the price of her daughter’s rescue is nicely creepy (because at that point it hasn’t been done over and over again), but that’s about it. Otherwise, you have a pretty good idea how the whole thing is going to play out, more or less, before the first act is over and at no point does it ever surprise. It’s a race against time that meanders, with a central conflict that doesn’t cost the protagonist a thing, and is so predictable that you don’t even really need to watch it to know how any given scene is going to play out. It doesn’t really play as a slow burn, because it never even rises to a smolder. It just sits there, inert and obvious, nothing new.

IMDB entry

Available on Netflix 

Game Over: Nope, Not Even A Metaphor

Every now and then I try to expand my horizons a little as I write this thing. I know for a fact that I have my wheelhouse (pretty much anything A24 distributes), and I’m very aware of the sort of stuff I don’t like, but I also know that there’s always the possibility that I’ll get stuck in a rut, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised in the past when I’ve pushed myself out of my comfort zone. Every now and then I’ll try to break one of my internal “rules” that I use when I’m flipping through movies looking for something to watch, just to see what happens. It occurred to me this last weekend that most of my viewing history lies heavily in North America and the UK, with a smattering of Japanese or Korean horror films. There are exceptions, but not many, so I went looking for something from elsewhere in the world. Broadening your horizons is a good thing.

Game Over, however, is not really a good thing. It’s a ludicrous, confused mishmash of stories that don’t really work together, with some pretty gross sexual politics to boot. I’m going to end up pretty much spoiling this one entirely, because it’s difficult to explain what’s wrong with it without getting into details. And there’s a lot wrong with it.

The film opens with a photo of a woman, with a number scratched into the corner of the photo.  We cut to a shot of this woman outside of her apartment, paying for a food delivery. The point of view is from across the street. Then it’s from just outside her window. Then inside the apartment, as nightvision. Someone is stalking her. And then they’re killing her, beheading her and burning her body.

Cut to a title card that says “One Year Later” and…another story entirely. We’re introduced to Sapna, a video game designer. She’s got a really nice place in Chennai, with a gated entrance, a security guard, and a maid, a woman named Kalamma who frets over her. She works on designing games, she spends a lot of time playing Pac-Man. She’s got a tattoo on the inside of her wrist, a pixelated heart with a game controller inside of it. She doesn’t sleep much. She doesn’t like leaving the house, she won’t return her parents’ calls. She really doesn’t like the dark.

And now, on New Year’s Day, she’s starting to suffer mysterious pains in her wrist, right where the tattoo is. Exactly one year after getting it. One year later. 

What does this have to do with the opening? Who can say? At least at first, this appears to be a story about how Sapna is more or less a prisoner in her own home for reasons that aren’t really clear at first, and the mysterious pain that may or may not be related to her tattoo. The first act is mostly just Sapna not wanting to talk to her parents, wondering why her wrist hurts, and going to therapy (where she goes through VR sessions intended to treat her fear of the dark, and strongly resemble a video game), punctuated by flashbacks to the events of a year before. When, as it eventually turns out, Sapna was abducted and sexually assaulted on New Year’s Day, on her way home from getting the tattoo. The anniversary is hitting her hard. 

And this is where one of my biggest problems with the movie comes in. I think it’s possible to use difficult, uncomfortable subject matter in horror and to use it well, but this…this ain’t it. At no point does Sapna’s pain and trauma and all of their consequences register as anything more than a prop, a contrivance to set up the events of the final act. She’s a woman in a country immersed in institutionalized rape culture - to the point that her parents effectively blame her for what happened to her - and it’s lingered on more than is necessary for the story, culminating in a pretty nasty sequence in a café, where Sapna discovers that her assault was recorded and distributed online when two bros at an adjacent table start arguing about whether or not she’s “the girl in the video” and bring up the footage on their smartphones. Sapna is suicidal by this point, but it’s not treated with any respect or gravity at all, it’s just there so an attempt can leave her wheelchair-bound during the climax. It all feels distastefully glib and more than a little prurient.

So there’s that, but then there’s my other big problem with this film - it careens from one narrative to another with little regard for any kind of through-line. If the first act is about establishing why Sapna is like she is, the second act is what seems to be a…ghost story? Apparently (speaking of contrivances), there was a mix-up at the tattoo studio where Sapna got her work done, and she got tattooed with ink containing ashes from…the remains of the woman murdered at the beginning of the movie. Maybe this is why she’s experiencing this mysterious the woman who was murdered at the beginning of the film. That also happened a year ago, and so maybe Sapna is experiencing her mysterious pain…because…ghost? It’s not really clear, we just find out that her name was Amudha, that she got tattooed at the same shop, and her mother came in after her death with the intent of getting a memorial tattoo that contained some of her daughter’s ashes but whoops! There’s a long film-within-a-film sequence as we (via Sapna) watch a tribute video Amudha’s mother put together after her murder celebrating her life and the cancer that she beat back into remission not one, but three times. Amudha got three hearts tattooed on her arm - one for each time her cancer went back into remission. 

And that’s going to be important, because in the third act it all comes together in the weirdest, most artificial way possible as the killer from the opening targets Sapna. Except it isn’t one killer, it’s three - a gang of men in identical masks and jumpsuits who apparently just go around murdering women, maybe because they got tattoos? That’s not really clear either, though Sapna’s parents are weirdly shaming about her having a tattoo, suggesting that it marks her as less virtuous and so maybe she was kind of asking for what happened to her and it’s all just fucking gross so let’s get back to the third act, which, if the first was half-assed psychological horror (it was) and the second was a half-assed ghost story (it was) , then the third act is a half-assed siege film that goes entirely off the rails as the initially metaphorical becomes really literal in just the most baffling way.

See, Sapna’s incessantly playing Pac-Man at the beginning. This is a game in which you are relentlessly pursued, and you’re constantly moving around a maze trying to avoid ghosts. Now, in the actual game, there are four ghosts, but in the version Sapna is shown playing, there are only three. There’s also the iconography of the heart - in video games, hearts can symbolize the amount of life or health a playable avatar has. Okay, with me so far? All of this metaphor become skull-clutchingly literal as the three killers (like the three ghosts in the version of Pac-Man she plays) stalk her through her own house, and now all of a sudden there are three hearts on her wrist, not one, like Amudha had, and so what happens next is that either Sapna and Kalamma gets caught and murdered, and then Sapna wakes up back at the start of the night with one less heart on her wrist just like in a video game. It makes no fucking sense in the context of anything that came before, except maybe in that it makes the first two acts seem even more artificial than they already did. Really, it just seems like an excuse to murder Sapna and Kalamma over and over again, prolonging their suffering in a way that seems downright sadistic. Basically, Sapna wakes back up, knows what to do differently the next time, then takes another shot at it, but each instance involves long, lingering takes on violence against her and Kalamma. 

So why is Sapna, as a character, traumatized? Because the filmmakers need something to make her helpless. When the psychological trauma doesn’t do, she attempts suicide and ends up with both legs badly broken so now she’s in a wheelchair with physical trauma as well, on top of parents who essentially blame her for her own rape. The bit with the ashes is, I guess, meant to either be something inspirational (though it comes off more maudlin than anything) or maybe that’s why she has “multiple lives” now, for…reasons? It really feels like the filmmakers had ideas for three different movies and couldn’t decide which one to make, so they made all of them instead, stitching them together with the thinnest of pretexts and using a genuinely upsetting subject as the springboard for a series of things that needed to happen to make the movie work. It’s shoddy storytelling and disrespectful to people who’ve gone through what they put their characters through. Suffering and trauma used as a prop, trauma from rape no less, in a film that has no idea what story it wants to tell. 

I’m not somebody who watches horror films to be entertained, really - I want to be unsettled, disturbed, moved to feel something I wouldn’t otherwise, and so I don’t have any problem with difficult or “problematic” subject matter. But, for Christ’s sake, make it mean something, and treat it with the respect it deserves. Don’t just treat it like a plot device. I definitely felt something when this film was over, but it was mostly just baffled, and a little mad at what I’d just seen. What a waste.

IMDB entry

Available on Netflix

Reunion: Family Matter

I’m not generally a fan of films that spell everything out, and if you’ve been reading this thing for awhile that’s pretty apparent. Horror thrives on mystery, on the ambiguous, on the unexplained. But it’s a balance - even if the overall feeling of a film is disorienting or dreamlike, there should still be some sort of reckoning. That is, the viewer should be able to more or less make sense of what they’ve just watched, even if that sense arrives very late in the film, otherwise horror is replaced with confusion. You can get away with a lot if you bring everything together in the end.

So this is probably my biggest problem with Reunion. It has a lot going for it - it’s a modern riff on traditional gothic horror, impressionistic, uneasy, and cryptic. But, ultimately, it might be a little too cryptic for its own good.

We open on an academic lecture - we don’t see the speaker, it’s just a voice over a slide show, rapid-fire images of medieval illustrations of reproduction and birth. The unseen lecturer is talking about the transition from medieval ideas of alchemy to modern conceptions of science, and how in essence what we now know as biology and chemistry have their roots in black magic. A subject in which the lecturer has a personal interest, though there’s no time to get into that today.

The lecturer is Ellie. She’s working on a book about this very subject, but she’s taken some time away to travel back to her childhood home. Her father, Jack, suffers from advanced dementia, feeble and wheelchair-bound, and Ivy, her mother, is preparing to sell the house. Ellie’s there to help, though Ivy seems more concerned with Ellie’s health. Ellie’s pregnant, and Ivy doesn’t want her exerting herself. There’s some suggestion that it’s been a difficult pregnancy. Ivy tells Ellie how happy she is that she left her abusive fiancée. There’s tension between them. You get the sense that there are a lot of things that are going unsaid. Ivy really doesn’t want to talk about Cara, Ellie’s adoptive sister, who died a long time ago.

So why does Ellie keep seeing her?

Structurally, it’s a movie that starts off with little hints that things aren’t what they appear, and as the film goes on, more and more is revealed through flashbacks that add a little more context with each iteration, leading to a walloping reveal at the end. And at its heart, it owes a lot to traditional gothic horror - you’ve got a big, stately house full of family secrets and mysterious apparitions, and though Ellie isn’t exactly an ingenue, her mother is certainly a forbidding figure throughout. It’s a lot less stylized and melodramatic than, say, Stoker, but it treads some of the same ground. Even if the characters here feel more like actual people, there’s a lot lurking under the surface, and it gets pretty fucking weird. You’ve got a mother who starts the film as a little controlling, but the longer you spend in the film the more her cruelty and manipulation, her gaslighting, becomes readily apparent. Ivy is desperately trying to cover up something that happened years and years ago, and Ellie is a daughter who’s had to struggle for a sense of normalcy most of her life as a result, burying herself in arcane academic subjects. Their story is told in flashbacks and nightmares, repeated and recontextualized motifs throughout, progressing and giving us a little more context every time in a way that conveys the sense that memories are being recovered, that things long repressed are coming back to the surface. Objects and images keep coming up again and again, like they do in dreams, heavy with significance even when you aren’t sure what the significance actually is. 

This sense of dream logic extends to how the story is told as well. The dialogue is terse, with lots of oblique exchanges and little asides - blink-and-you-miss-it moments that make you think “what did she just say?” The film takes place almost entirely inside the house, all dark wood and stained glass, shafts of sunlight spilling onto antiques and stacks of boxes. There are nightmare sequences that weave in and out of the narrative alongside the flashbacks, so it isn’t always clear how much of what we’re seeing actually happened or is actually happening and how much is metaphor, and the action is punctuated by interludes of a sort - slideshows like the one that opens the film, slow-motion close-ups of cellular reproduction, blood flow, a feeling of the body as universe. The end result is almost as much tone poem as it is gothic horror, something that you don’t so much think about as feel while you watch it, the details blurring into a wash. As the film goes on, things get more and more bizarre, the lecture voicovers spiral into ranting, Ivy’s behavior likewise totters toward madness, and just when you think you have a handle on what this family’s horrible secret actually is, there’s something else that’s been foreshadowed all along, but not so much that it feels obvious when it becomes clear.

But in some ways, the things that give this film a very specific and uneasy atmosphere are things that work against it as well. The problem is that there’s a lot going on and it’s all presented so cursorily and briefly and in the margins that it’s hard to really get a fix on what the story is, like what the specific through-line is. It seems like it’s about Ellie’s attempts to resolve a childhood trauma, with her own mental health in a precarious condition, and there are ghost-story elements that presumably emerge from that. However, because we don’t really get a firm grounding in “reality” to start, the revelations we get in the last act maybe don’t quite hit as hard as they could, and the final revelation at the climax, which should be a game-changer, feels a little too confusing to have the impact it should, because it’s difficult to tell if it’s something that diegetically happened or if it’s another layer of metaphor, a more dramatically nightmarish expression of Ellie’s trauma. It’s still well-made, well-written and well-acted, and though it does take awhile to get there, it does get really unsettling in ways natural and supernatural by the final act. But if you’re going to be cryptic, then the pieces all need to fall into place in a way that makes all of the prior weirdness clear. There needs to be a reckoning, some kind of resolution, and this film seems reluctant to commit one way or another. It doesn’t ruin it, but it does take some of the sting out of it.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

Gretel And Hansel: Avoiding The Obvious “Grim Fairy Tale” Joke

Following from my reconsideration of Midsommar last week, I got to thinking that fairytales, when you get right down to them, are dark and unsettling. They’re supposed to be, because they’re morality tales, ways to teach the young survival skills and cultural mores. They communicate to children that these are the stakes of straying from the straight and narrow, relics from a time when carelessness could easily get you killed. Over the generations their teeth have been lost, but if you look at what actually happens in these stories, holy shit. Every now and then you’ll see what’s supposed to be a horror “reimagining” of a fairy tale, but these are usually just gimmicky riffs on the slasher film. Nothing to write home about.

Gretel And Hansel, on the other hand, is an atmospheric and spooky reimagining of the classic fairytale, less a straight retelling of the story than an opportunity to explore it and the ideas around it, around what a world like theirs would be like, what witches are, and what it means to have (or be in) a story. It stumbles at points, but there’s a lot here to appreciate.

The film opens with the story of a little girl in a pink cap, and the bargain with darkness that her parents struck to save her life. It worked, and their only child did not die, but she was…changed…by the experience. She could bend others’ will to hers, to horrifying effect. And so her mother - now a widow - abandoned her to her fate, casting her out of the village and deep into the forest.

But that was a long time ago, and here and now we are concerned with Gretel, her brother Hansel in tow. It’s just the two of them and their mother, since their father has gone to his reward. She’s gone to the master of an inn to ask for work. She can bake, and launder. But the inn’s master in more interested in whether or not she’s kept her maidenhood. Gretel walks away, realizing she isn’t wanted for honest work, and Hansel asks her why she couldn’t have been more agreeable - he’s very hungry, and there could have been food there. Their mother is equally unsympathetic - poverty, disease, and traumatic grief have made her utterly incapable of taking care of them, and she entreats Gretel to dig their graves instead.

So there is no home for Gretel and Hansel anymore, they have been abandoned to their fate as well. They can do nothing but trek into the woods and hope to find shelter. And after some misadventure, they make their way to a lone cabin in the middle of the forest. There’s a warm light in the windows, and the table is laden with food. An old woman lives there. It seems like she’s been there awhile.

As if she moved deep into the forest a long time ago.

If you’re at all familiar with the fairytale, you’ve got a pretty good idea of how this story goes, but what makes this film interesting (besides its skillful execution) is the spin it puts on that story, how it recontextualizes it and uses it as a platform to think about the importance of self-definition and self-determination. First, it takes place in a very grounded world, one where pestilence and war has devastated the population, and everyone exists on the knife-edge of survival. Starvation and decay hang over the land like a miasma, and there’s little hope or mercy to be found. Gretel and Hansel are children, vulnerable, in a world where there are plenty of people prepared to take advantage. This film recasts Gretel as being older than Hansel, so she has to shoulder a lot of responsibility at what is still a very young age. There’s some resentment there because Hansel is, well, an impulsive little boy. This causes problems because he doesn’t have Gretel’s caution or restraint. He has little sense of danger, only his own desire to prove how brave and strong he is. The first part of the movie, then, almost plays like a 19th-century version of The Road as they fight hunger and exhaustion in their search for safety. 

Once they arrive at the old woman’s house, the film then does a lot of work around the different conceptions of witches. We have the little girl in the pink cap who is inherently evil (described in what is essentially a fairytale-within-a-fairytale), born of a bargain with darkness. But we also have the crone, the old woman who keeps herself to herself, who is wise in the ways of herbs and nature. It’s a depiction of witchcraft with which we’re familiar, albeit not in the context of this story. The film even cheekily nods to The Wizard Of Oz in a couple of places as well, and both the caricatured black-clad, pointy-hatted evocation of witchcraft as well as something closer to the sorceress, a powerful ritual magician. So it’s never as simple as “lure kids in with candy and throw them in the oven.” There’s a lot of other things going on. The crone who takes them in sees something in Gretel, and sees Hansel as burdening her, weighing her down. The story is less “mwhahahaha I am going to eat you,” and more “as long as your little brother is around, you’re not going to be able to grow into your own person because you feel obligated to take care of him.” The crone is almost more of a mentor to Gretel than anything else, and shows Gretel that she is powerful, and begins to teach her how to harness that power and use it to forge her own path, free of the expectations of others. It’s rooted in the original text, but uses it as a springboard to larger ideas. 

Which is not to say that there isn’t something very dark going on here, because there is. The crone doesn’t keep animals, does not raise crops, and yet there is always food. And as Gretel points out, nothing is given without a price. It’s beautifully, beautifully shot, with lots of brooding, windswept forest panoramas and dim, firelit interiors, spikily punctuated with plenty of striking nightmare sequences and inventive compositional and editing choices. The dialogue is a mixture of archaic and modern, mostly period-appropriate with the occasional anachronistic phrase thrown in, and the soundtrack is mostly dominated by synthesizer, which adds to the out-of-time quality while complementing the overall mood nicely. This creates the same sense of dreamy timelessness as the director’s other films - The Blackcoat’s Daughter and I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House - but here it lands better in some spots than others, and it shares the latter film’s tendency toward pontification, to its detriment, especially in the final act, which tips a little too much in favor of windy monologues at a point when what it really needs is faster pacing and more intensity. It never really builds to the crescendo that it should, and it loses a bit of steam in the last act. It’s vividly realized, but there’s a bit of coldness to it, some distance. 

Even if the denouement isn’t as cathartically scary as I wanted it to be (to its credit, it also never relies on jump scares - this is a film that, when it does do creepy, it does it very deliberately and very well), it invokes the idea of our personal “stories” to interesting effect - these people are literally in a story, a story in which other stories play a role, but the course of our lives is also sometimes called “our story,” so it’s as much about Gretel and Hansel’s right (and obligation) to find their own way, to become who they are meant to be, free of the hindrance of others, no matter how well-intentioned, as anything else. Which is a hell of a note for a fairytale. Pretty much a modern morality tale right there, a way to teach the young our values now, as much as ever.

IMDB entry

Available on Hulu

Available on Amazon

Reconsidered: Midsommar

(What I'd like to do in my Reconsidered posts is take a more in-depth look at films that I think have something to offer beyond the text. A solidly composed horror film is a wonderful thing, but a solidly composed horror film that keeps me thinking about it for days afterward is an even more wonderful thing and a joy forever. I'll be writing with the assumption that the reader is familiar with the basic plot and characters, so needless to say, all kinds of spoilers ahoy.)

Midsommar - like director Ari Aster’s other horror film, Hereditary - is very much a film where there’s more going on than is apparent to the protagonists, with some kind of horrifying revelation coming at the climax. Think Rosemary’s Baby, or more recently, Kill List. They’re the kind of films where everything feels a little strange or off-kilter, but you can’t always put your finger on why until some kind of reveal, which puts everything you’ve just seen into context. It’s a tricky thing to pull off - if you’re too opaque, your revelation feels like it comes out of nowhere and the audience is confused. If you aren’t opaque enough, it’s obvious what’s happening, and you lose the shock of revelation.

So Aster really, really skillfully rides the line, by putting everything you need to understand what’s happening right in front of you, but doing so in such a way that you don’t realize it until it’s all over. This isn’t unique to him, but he’s mastered it in a way that few have. In the case of Midsommar, it’s in service of a story that uses the framework of a fairytale to tell a story of toxic masculinity in at least a couple of different forms - one more obvious than the other.